1928 United States presidential election

Herbert Hoover beat Al Smith 444 electoral votes to 87, which on the totals looks like a routine Republican year. The realignment sits beneath them. Smith, the Catholic, anti-Prohibition governor of New York and the first Catholic nominated by a major party, lost Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, a rare Republican break into the old Confederacy. Yet the Democrats carried most of the nation's large cities for the first time. V.O. Key argued that 1928 was a critical election, at least in the New England towns he studied, but historians still disagree over whether it began a realignment or only foreshadowed one, making this the most debated entry here. Read it with 1932, when that urban vote joined a national majority.